A leading question in primary care is whether practices can shift towards delivering better preventive and proactive health services. A key barrier to that shift is the current payment system, which pays providers for visits with sick patients rather than for preventing illness. So Stanford Health Policy’s Sanjay Basu, MD, PhD, and colleagues set out …Read More

Health policy researcher Kathryn McDonald, PhD, recently asked a group of physicians who work with low-income patients in San Francisco what keeps them up at night. They told her that making an error, such as one that could lead to a missed cancer diagnosis, is their greatest fear. After all, missed cancer diagnoses are the leading …Read More

New legislation introduced last week to could reduce foreign aid by $10 billion. Some of these cuts would affect global health organizations that fight HIV infection and malaria and provide family planning and contraceptive services. Stanford health policy researcher Eran Bendavid, MD, has spoken out against proposed cuts. Saving lives and improving health in other parts …Read More

While the education gap is virtually nil in the United States, fewer girls in developing countries finish high school. And this results in poor health and economic outcomes for themselves, their own children, and the countries in which they live. One of Stanford Health Policy’s physician-economists took a deep look at why that is and …Read More

Mike Baiocchi, PhD, grew up in a family of nurses and passionate public health advocates. He says a liberal can-do attitude was baked into his DNA. So when he came out as a math guy to his family, he told me in an interview, Baiocchi knew he had to apply his PhD in statistics in …Read More

End-stage renal disease makes up 7.2 percent of Medicare spending, even though those patients represent less than 1 percent of the Medicare population, according to a database that tracks chronic kidney disease. In an effort to lower health-care costs, Congress established the ESRD Prospective Payment System in 2008, as part of the Medicare Improvement for …Read More

A new study has yielded what might come as a surprise to some: There was a spike in the number of Californians who bought handguns for the first time after the 2012 mass shooting of children and teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, and then again after a deadly attack in San Bernardino in 2015. According …Read More

The administration’s budget proposes cutting funding to the National Institutes of Health by more than $7 billion in the next two years. That has many Stanford Health Policy researchers, including Jonathan Chen, MD, PhD, concerned. I wrote about Chen in a recent article for Stanford Health Policy: Jonathan Chen has a doctorate in computer science …Read More

The GOP’s proposed American Health Care Act may now be dead, but health policy experts say there are plenty of other health-care reforms the Trump administration may attempt. Michelle Mello, PhD, JD, and David Studdert, ScD, both professors at Stanford’s medical school and law school and core faculty members at Stanford Health Policy, say medical …Read More

As Congress considers the GOP’s American Health Care Act, there are likely many people out there who don’t know that the proposed legislation calls for the defunding of Planned Parenthood. I asked Meena Chelvakumar, MD, a family medicine physician and a VA Health Services Research and Development Fellow here at Stanford Health Policy, to weigh in on …Read More